November 22, 2022

Free, small-d democratic societies are degenerating into tyrannies before our very eyes. Even as our own dominant media ignore the obvious, people around the world are noticing. As reported by Susan D. Harris today, the new government in Brazil, following an election that has been widely disputed as fixed by millions of demonstrators, has learned from the totalitarian response of the Trudeau government in Canada, seizing the bank accounts of protestors in that nation’s Freedom Convoy in Ottawa, and is trying to take away demonstrators’ children from the custody of their parents.

Demonization and confiscation of the assets of regime opponents are hallmarks of totalitarian regimes, even when given a patina of legality through executive orders and the like.

In the United States, hundreds of political prisoners languish in DC jails, with 20 months of pretrial confinement (many in solitary), an outrageous abuse of the judicial system that has drawn almost no protest from the powers that be in the Republican Party, fearful, evidently, of being tarred with the brush of an “insurrection” that was the first in history to be unarmed and ushered into the seat of Congress by guards holding open the doors.

At least in Brazil, a country whose democratic traditions were, until now, regarded as weaker than those of the USA, millions of citizens are turning out to protest what they regard as a stolen election. And the former head of government, President Jair Bolsonaro, is not only speaking out, he is comparing his own country’s stolen election with that of the United States. Watch the video in this tweet as he responds to a question in English from a reporter from the United States who asks if his election was stolen as was America’s, and he responds, “Pretty much the same way.”

Photo credit: Twitter video screengrab